LaFayette author pleads guilty to child porn charge

ELKHORN  Walter S. Dunn, an elderly historian and author who says heís addicted to pornography, pleaded guilty Wednesday to felony possession of child pornography in exchange for a plea bargain that places him on probation with no incarceration.

Dunn, 82, of LaFayette is scheduled for sentencing at 9 a.m. Dec. 1 before Judge James Carlson.

Dunn appeared in Carlsonís Walworth County court and admitted that he had possessed pictures of underage girls engaged in sex acts with adults.

The length of Dunnís probation will be argued during sentencing. He is not to have contact with children under 16, Carlson ordered.

Neither prosecution nor defense attorneys could say exactly how many child pornography images Dunn owned at the time of his June 2 arrest at his rural Walworth County home.

The criminal complaint against him reported Dunn had at least six images of children among the 2,000 CDs and 400 VHS tapes of adult pornography that investigators found at his home.

Carlson told attorneys for Dunn and the county that he wanted an accurate count before he imposed a sentence.

Dunn has written more than a dozen history books about World War II, Walworth County and the American frontier. He is a retired museum curator who once worked at the State Historical Society Museum.

An Elkhorn computer technician discovered the child porn images while he was diagnosing one of Dunnís computers for an operating problem.

When the technician saw the images of naked children on the computer and found a pornographic disk in the disk drive, he contacted police, according to a criminal complaint. Dunn showed investigators his collection and told them he was addicted to smut.